Videogame Narrativity: Tense-Aspect-Mood, Mechanical Drifting, and the Valences of Play in <i>Kentucky Route Zero</i> ’s “The Death of the Hired Man”

Abstract This article observes how videogame narrative might retain certain aspects of narrative’s linguistic genesis, actively remediating these grammatical elements into a pragmatic fusion of gameplay and narrative that I refer to as videogame narrativity. A prime example of narrative discourse being remediated in video games can be found in Cardboard Computers’ Kentucky Route Zero ( KR0 ) (2011-2020). KR0 adapts narrative tense-aspect relationships to the videogame form through the conceptual intermingling of its four main narrative moods: debt, dwelling, death, and haunting. In the process of inhabiting the gameworld from outside through their gameplay, the player’s dual-positioning is reinforced by these tense-aspect-mood relationships. As the game proceeds, this positioning becomes increasingly clarified by defamiliarizing the sense of ‘dwelling’ immersive gameplay effectuates; put simply, mechanical forms of control drift away from the player, who is then asked to learn new modalities of ‘play’ beyond the mechanical. As control slowly wanes over its five Acts, players are pushed to adopt several interwoven valences of play which, at the same time, connote different forms of mediation in KR0 : 1) playing the game; 2) playing in terms of dramatic acting; 3) the ‘playing’ of media by new media artifacts; and, 4) playing musical instruments. While there are many examples of these valences intersecting in the game’s multifaceted narrative – including in the central plot’s nostalgic longing for an American Rust Belt that can no longer exist – one of the clearest examples is in the optional side plot concerning James Carrington and his adaptation of Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man” into an “experimental theater production.” By observing how KR0 adapts Frost’s concept of poetic, spiritual, and topical drifting into a kind of ‘mechanical drifting’ that slowly removes conventional forms of player control, I argue that Carrington’s ‘failed’ adaptation weaves together the valences of play into a dynamic fusion of narrative discourse and player interaction. Thus, Carrington’s plot duplicates the larger narrativity of KR0 in miniature form, reflecting the ‘logic’ structuring the game back onto players in a way that clarifies it.